Quote

When you are simply observing your breath, you are perceiving an automatically unfolding process in your body. By contrast, when you are observing your wandering mind, you are also experiencing the spontaneous activity of a process in your body.

Thomas Metzinger

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Thomas Metzinger
Age: 66
Born: 1958
Born: March 12
Philosopher
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
Frankfurt/Main
Process
Observing
Also
Spontaneous
Body
Contrast
Mind
Wander
Perceiving
Breath
Wandering
Breaths
Unfolding
Activity
Automatically
Simply
Experiencing

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I could never understand how someone would embark on their life without having first confronted and clarified the truly fundamental questions.
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One of the interesting characteristics of the Ego Tunnel is that it creates (as Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo called it) a robust out-of-the brain experience, a highly realistic experience of not operating on internal models, but of effortlessly being in direct and immediate contact with the external world - and oneself.
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Conscious experience as such is an exclusively internal affair: Once all functional properties of your brain are fixed, the character of subjective experience is determined as well.
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As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.
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Virtual reality is the representation of possible worlds and possible selves, with the aim of making them appear as real as possible - ideally, by creating a subjective sense of presence and full immersion in the user.
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As far as inner action is concerned, we are only rarely truly self-determined persons, for the major part of our conscious mental activity rather is an automatic, unintentional form of behavior on the subpersonal level.
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As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is availability for introspective attention: Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.
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Imagine you are trying to lose weight and attempting to concentrate on writing an article, but there is a bowl with your favorite chocolate cookies in your field of vision, a permanent immoral offer. If we are capable of rejecting such offers or to postpone them into the future, then we can also concentrate on that which we currently want to do.
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I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what first-person perspective (or quale or consciousness) means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.
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Subjectivity means to catch yourself in the act.
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Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.
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For a human being, to possess a consciously experienced first-person perspective means to have acquired a very specific functional profile and distinctive level of representational content in one's currently active phenomenal self-model: It has, episodically, become a dynamic inner model of a knowing self.
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All attention is introspection.
Thomas Metzinger
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The Ego is a transparent mental image: You, the physical person as a whole, look right through it. You do not see it. But you see with it.
Thomas Metzinger
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Retribution is really a stone age concept.
Thomas Metzinger
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Subjectivity is an ability, the capacity to use a new inner mode of presenting the fact that you currently know something to yourself.
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If we lose the ability in question for a single moment only, we are immediately being hijacked by an aggressive little Think me! and our mind begins to wander.
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Someone who cannot stop his outer flow of words will soon be unable to communicate with other human beings at all.
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